An Indistinguishable Bigness

David’s new apartment complex was a ribcage. Sun-bleached bone cracked under the pressure of its own perpetual inhale. The halls were a one way atrium and the rooms, delicate ventricles separated by a thick septum. The beating walls only stalled when it realized that pushing inward was better than being so far apart.

The gasp was maddening. The worst of the world’s silence followed by bursts of commotion David could only describe as welcome distraction. The family of five that occupied the void across from him had turned into his routine. David used their school age children’s morning bustle as an alarm, their toddler’s afternoon fuss as a signal for lunch, and let the parents’ nightly arguments lull him to sleep. He enjoyed their company. Their reality.

Some inner child David didn’t even know he had wanted to join them. That child was hungry, desperate fingers drawn out to reach them. He wanted to ride along with the older children when they went to school on the early city bus. He wanted to walk beside the mother when she left down the street in those noisy high heels and join the father when he blasted music at home alone with the baby. He couldn’t tell if he was more disgusted with himself for wanting to be included or with them for having each other.

Compared to David’s bleak room, they were from a different world. 

It wasn’t just his complex. It was the entire city. Each building a boxy little universe floating along by itself, secluded. Parallel lines stretching vertical into the Sun, never meant to touch. Grass always a little greener. A decidedly broken skyline. A silhouette, like a child’s perception of a big city. A comic book artist’s no copyright amalgamation. Big in every way but emotional. An indistinguishable bigness. 

It was the exact opposite of the home David had grown up in. He had come from a cozy house made by his grandfather on an open plot of land. The sturdy wood seemed to perch on it’s own fists, the definition of an atlas. Even though it was only him and his grandfather, David couldn’t recall ever feeling like he did now. When he wasn’t playing with the other kids in their neighborhood, he spent almost all of his time alone. Content.

He would go behind his house, lie on a mattress of warm, dewey grass and soak it all in. It was quiet then. The only thing he heard was the sound of his own heart beating into the dirt below him. He was a part of something then. Equals with solitude, rather than swallowed by it.

David wasn’t sure he’d ever feel that again. 

Sometimes he tried to recapture something akin to that warmth. It was hard to find in the city and even harder to find when he was confined inside. He walked the length of his tiny home, looking for places to catch some Sun.There were two windows in his apartment. One in the bathroom and one in the kitchen. The one in the bathroom was barely a sliver, just big enough to let some Sun kiss the top of his head when he showered. The one in the kitchen was bigger and surrounded in yellow. Custard colored walls, a shotty paint job left behind from the last tenets. If he stared at them long enough, he could pretend the walls were rays. Flat streaks of  sunshine touching him the only way it knew how. He wondered if the Sun missed him too?

When David stood in the kitchen, watching that refracted light try it’s best to touch him in the dark fortress, he knew he was at the vertex of his life. He had plateaued years ago. Got too complacent with being fulfilled. Life had been too even so it needed to take a dip to compensate. That was what it meant to be an adult.

It meant to relinquish that feeling of togetherness. David thought he had buried that yearning when he left his childhood home. With his cast iron shovel plunged deep into the fertile dirt, he dug a grave for that childish need. It was in the same plot as his grandfather. Two symbols of togetherness at rest with each other. He hadn't realized that he never really let them go until he was missing everything they stood for.

That earnest, human need to be with someone else was hard to bury. David understood that it would be impossible for him to do anyways. For as long as he lived till the moment he died, he would search for that feeling. Sit on the counter, hoping for Sun rather than seeking it out.

It was a staggering realization that David was not the main character. Even in his own life. There was no such thing. There was no plot to protect him or narrative to swaddle him gently into his destiny. He could die in his room and no one would ever know. Choke on his own spit and have the police turn up weeks later when the stink of his body became unbearable.

Those faceless participants in the world beyond would read about him. Maybe some would even feel bad for a moment before they went about their business. They wouldn’t understand what could put someone on David’s path. No one would understand how he had ended up so alone that his life became meaningless. He saw himself in their position sometimes. A bystander on the street, reading the news off of a phone. From the comfort of that removed pace, he glanced up at the apartment and noticed how quaint it looked from the outside. The light hit it perfectly.

It was almost too perfect. A person outside of it all, a person who knew they had someone waiting for them at home. From that comfortable place way outside of it all, David asked himself what it would be like to leave? 

What would it be like to walk out of the front door and find out?